Posts Tagged by personalized book

Hannah loves reading. She is partial to anything with Mickey Mouse and gets me to read this 50-something page book about Mickey and friends having a picnic. All. The. Time. Sigh.

I dread when she asks me to read that book. I’m just over it. I’ve read it to her about 1 million times. And that is quite enough, thanks. But she still asks for more, and I know that it’s beneficial for kids her age to hear things over and over and over again. Did I mention sigh?

But how to steer her away from the dreaded Mickey book to something else? Something new. Something different.

I got an email asking if I’d like to review a personalized children’s book. A book that actually has Hannah’s name in it. And some of her friends too.

I was very excited. Surely she’d switch from wanting me to read Mickey all the time to wanting me to read the new book? Plus it’s cool. They didn’t have such coolness when I was a kid.

The book came a couple of weeks before Hannah’s birthday. I chose a Sesame Street book as she knows the characters and does quite like Elmo even though I had to take the voice box out of her tickle me Elmo because it creeped her out. It was pretty creepy. I’ll give her that.

I decided to save the book for her birthday. I thought it would make a great present.

Unfortunately, it somehow got missed when I brought her presents out from under my bed and since Grandma bought her nearly a thousand birthday presents (fine, that is a little exaggerated), I didn’t notice until the next day when I suddenly remembered that I couldn’t recall her opening her awesome personalized book.

So she didn’t get to open it on her birthday, but she did get to open it the next day. Kids don’t usually get presents the day after their birthday, so she was pretty excited.

I held off on actually reading more than the first few pages of it to her as I really wanted to tape it. I wanted a video of her excited little face when her name and Daniel’s name and her best friends name came up over and over again in the book.

But video taping and reading involves either a tripod, or an Aaron to hold the camera. Plus Daniel would have to be asleep so he didn’t knock down the tripod and try to eat the camera (seriously, he would), or jump on Aaron as he tried to film. He’s cheeky like that.

Yeah, I never got around to the filming.

I was itching to read the book to her, so I gave in one day and just did it. Without the filming.

“It was a busy day on Sesame Street. Everyone was preparing for the big art show. Hannah Thomson, age 3, from Sydney, NSW was coming to judge the show.”

At the mention of her name, age, and town, she lit up. There was no way the name was a coincidence when all the other info unique to her was there too. She knew it was about her.

“Hannah was bringing Daniel, Violet, and Annie to help her.”

She giggled a happy, excited little giggle at the mention of her brother and two friends.

Hannah loved hearing about her day on Sesame Street, since kids her age think the world revolves around them. She even paid attention to the whole book without getting bored, felt relaxed enough to poop on the potty while I read it to her (anyone who reads my other blog would know what an accomplishment that was).

PROS:

-Unique
-Personalized
-Reasonably priced
- Great keepsake
-Well made with thick paper and hard cover
-Fun to read (even for the adult!)
-Would appeal to all kids as all kids like hearing about themselves

CONS:

-Only ships to U.S.
-The font used is not the best. It could have looked a lot better with a different font.